TEMPORARY INSANITY:
A WORLD IN TRANSITION

Our entire globe is convulsed with change. All over the world there's confusion over values, a loss of ethical certainty, a bewildering lack of consensus about almost everything.

If you want to understand the root of all this confusion, one place to start is the battle over evolution. Because this old argument reflects two widely held but fundamentally opposite ways of conceptualizing the world. Creationists and scientists are after all considering the same data—a planet full of living creatures of extraordinary complexity, coexisting in a biological and ecological system of even greater complexity. The creationist looks at all this and thinks, this could only have come about as the conscious creation of a humanoid intelligence—some sort of uber-authority—since it would be impossible for this sort of thing to evolve on its own. He assumes that complexity presupposes intelligence. The scientist, on the other, as well as men like Gregory Bateson, would say the creationist has it backwards—that intelligence presupposes complexity. It’s the result, not the cause of it. Lewis Thomas points out that a single ant wandering about in aimless circles seems the height of stupidity. It’s only when you’re confronted with one of those long columns, running all the way from your garden into the house, up the stairs, into your cat’s dish or honey jar and back again, that you can say intelligence is at work. But whose? There’s no dictator ant. Alone every ant is as stupid as the next.

Creationism is inherently anti-democratic. It says order can only be imposed from above—it can’t evolve from interaction among equals. The great visionary Mary Parker Follett called democracy a form of self-creating coherence. This tendency toward spontaneous integration by living things is a deeply spiritual concept to many people, but anathema to mainstream religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which are, at their core, deeply authoritarian.

Like the creationists, Thomas Hobbes and the other social contract theorists who lived under kings, couldn’t imagine order evolving spontaneously. In keeping with the still feudalistic authoritarian ideology of their day, the contract theorists thought of nature as something inherently chaotic that had to be restrained by force.

Creationism, in other words, is based on a cultural principle of control, while evolutionary theory is based on a cultural assumption of spontaneous integration. This difference underlies virtually all the social changes and conflicts that have arisen in the past century or more. I’ll come back to this point in a moment.

MISUNDERSTANDING THE SIXTIES

I’ve been impressed lately with how poorly people today understand the sixties. To the media, of course, the decade was just about wearing funny clothes and long hair, taking drugs and protesting. It came and went, like all fashions. Because that’s what the media are about—fashions, surfaces, fads. They can’t deal with long-term trends—they’re too busy with the moment. Long-term to them is a few months.

Many of my friends, on the other hand, absurdly idealize the sixties and compare it favorably with the present. They seem to have forgotten that in the sixties what we think of as a red state mentality characterized virtually the entire nation. The sixties innovators were long on visibility but short on numbers. It’s important to remember that after all the huge marches and protests between 1969 and 1971, Nixon won the 1972 election in a landslide. Not in a close, probably stolen election, but in a landslide. It’s important to keep things in perspective.

The sixties were after all just a beginning. And while beginnings are fun and fascinating and exciting, they only become significant if what has begun continues to grow. And in this, most important sense, the sixties never ended. Did Jim Crow return to the South? Did blacks disappear from TV? Did women go back in the kitchen and stop going to professional schools? Did sex become taboo in the media and people start having to pretend they were married to live together or have children? Did interest in New Age ideas, alternative medicine, and organic foods suddenly come to an end? Did everyone revert to the environmental habits of the 1950s? Did people stop protesting wars?

The fact is, all those trends that began in the sixties have flowered and multiplied in the ensuing decades. If this weren’t so—if it had all just blown over, the neo-cons wouldn’t exist. The fundamentalist backlash that has swept the United States during the past two decades was a frightened reaction to the radical changes that began in the sixties. It was the overthrowing of a whole cluster of fundamental cultural assumptions at once that struck terror in the hearts of traditionalists the world over.

Few people at the time recognized the common denominator to these movements, and the various groups involved--hippies, anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, feminists--engaged in loud and bitter arguments about priorities. But in fact an entire cultural premise was being overthrown.

So what was this overthrowing about, and what is its core?

It has been said that there’s a “culture war” being waged around the world, one side of which is conservative Islam. But the real culture clash is taking place within Islam, as well as within the United States, within the corporate world, within science, within the arts. This is not a conflict between nations, or between religious traditions, or between left and right. The struggle is taking place WITHIN every nation, every political party, every religious tradition, every institution, every individual. No group of people gathered together can long be free of this conflict, which is the most profound alteration in human culture since the invention of agriculture.

For in fact it was with agriculture that the mega-culture that has dominated the globe for the last ten millennia began. By mega-culture I mean common values and traditions that subsume the various ethnic cultures of the world. Since the dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry this mega-culture has extended itself to the farthest corners of the earth. Those that have failed to embrace it have been largely exterminated, or remain as intellectual curiosities. Even most so-called “primitive” cultures came under its sway long before Europeans discovered them.

We've been steeped for so long in this cultural system that many people assume its customs and norms are locked in our DNA. They think its traditions are just "human nature". But what was "human nature" two thousand years ago is very different from what "human nature" was twenty thousand years ago, or what it will be a thousand years from now. Human societies have managed to persuade people to act in the most varied and outlandish ways, and to believe their odd habits "natural".

THE CULTURE OF CONTROL

Prior to today’s upheaval the most profound event in our planet’s history was the moment humans decided not to rely on the earth’s abundance, like other species, but to attempt to control it, by manipulating crops and flocks. It started us down a long, arduous, and frustrating road from which there is no turning back. Nor do we want to turn back. We’re proud of our achievements. Yet we’re occasionally made aware of the price. Virtually all ‘advanced’ cultures have a tradition of a ‘fall’—from a ‘golden age’, an Eden.

The Greeks described this golden age precisely: “The earth herself, without compulsion, untouched by hoe or plowshare, of herself gave all things needful.” Hesiod was obviously talking here about hunter-gatherers. And the Garden of Eden myth tells the same story—how the knowledge of the way a fruit—probably a pomegranate—can produce a tree, led to “hoes and plowshares”, and hence to constant toil and suffering. Hesiod describes the then current ‘iron age’ in exactly the same terms. Trying to control your environment takes work.

This attempt to control nature was an addictive drug, requiring bigger and bigger hits. For before long it’s not just plants and animals and insects that have to be controlled—it’s other people. And ultimately, yourself. Control requires a lot of splitting—ourselves from the earth, ourselves from other people—from ‘enemies’—and our egos from our bodies, our feelings, our instincts. “Control yourself, child!” becomes the core of childrearing.

In the 18th century, what I call Control Culture began to be challenged—just as it was reaching its peak. But before discussing its challenger I want to say a few words about how this system—so familiar to us all—operates.

If your life revolves around getting control--over Nature, other people, and your own body and feelings--you can't look at the world around you as one great indissoluble, ever-changing Unity. How could you ever control such a thing? So Control Culture tended to split it up ("divide and conquer"), to see the world as a static collection of paired opposites: friend/enemy, master/slave, mind/body, man/nature, aristocrat/peasant, good/evil. It was a world that fit the Bible and Newton's Clockwork Universe equally well.

Another problem for the Controller is that living things aren't all that crazy about being controlled, so you're going to have to fight a lot. Control Culture was a warrior culture--competitive, belligerent, macho. And a culture based on war tends to be authoritarian. Slaves and serfs have to be kept in line, and fighting men--trained to be competitive and quarrelsome--have to be controlled. So rigid hierarchies with rigid rules of behavior became the norm. And because war was viewed as the most noble masculine profession, parents raised their boys to be 'from Mars'--that is, stoic, rigid, and aggressive, while women were expected to specialize in cooperation, intimacy, and nurturance. And since women weren't doing soldierly things they wound up at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Even the lowest serf was expected to dominate his wife.

I mention the position of women last, but in fact it’s the foundation of the entire system. You cannot have an authoritarian, war-like society unless women are devalued and oppressed. In 2003 the Southern Baptist convention decreed both that lay people could no longer interpret scripture (a decision Muslim Imams made in the 14th century and the Catholic Church much earlier) and that women could no longer act as clergy.

It is an axiom of Control Culture that a woman must not be allowed freedom of choice—not just about whether to bear a child or not, but about what she does with her life, who she sleeps with, how she looks—everything. Controlling women is fundamental to Control Culture, and women have the lowest possible status wherever Control Culture is predominant. We in the West are horrified that elders in a Pakistani village would order a woman to be gang-raped as punishment for her brother’s crime, but in the Bible, Lot is considered noble because he offers his daughters to be gang-raped by a mob in order to protect his male guests.

Serious challenges to this cultural system came first, as I said, in the 18th century, in the form of democratic ideology--triggered by encounters with hunter-gatherer societies in the new world. Pacifism, feminism, and environmentalism followed in the 19th and 20th.

SCIENCE

Meanwhile scientists were arriving at a vision of the universe that undermined some of the Control Culture’s most fundamental assumptions.

It helps to imagine that you can control the universe if you see it as fragmented, rather than as an indissoluble unity that incorporates yourself. Hence Controller science had a kind of Lego image of the universe—saw it as consisting of little hunks of matter that could be put together and taken apart, like a machine. In Newtonian physics the universe was a mechanism with removable parts, like a big clock.

Traditional science was fueled by the desire to control nature--to suppress its capriciousness, its unpredictability. Nature became an object--something to be observed, conquered, and used. Ultimately, Control Culture scientists thought, they would make everything in the universe predictable, and hence, controllable. This fantasy was laid to rest by Chaos theory.

Newtonian physics portrayed a physical universe of separate parts. The new science gives us the vision of an entangled universe where everything is subtly connected to everything else. Einsteinian physics, says David Bohm, compels us to look at the universe as an undivided whole: any seemingly individual element actually contains enfolded within itself that whole, and each event that occurs is influenced, not by a linear causal chain, but by the whole universe. Science, says Robert Laughlin, has now moved from an Age of Reductionism to an Age of Emergence. But the concept of Emergence means the fundamental impossibility of control. The objective of understanding nature by breaking it down into ever smaller parts is supplanted by the objective of understanding how nature organizes itself.

These fundamental changes in scientific theory are merely one aspect of the decline of Control Culture, and the emergence of what I will call, for want of a better term, Integrative Culture. The conflict between them affects every aspect of our lives. Let me summarize the differences.

Control Culture viewed the universe as a gigantic, clockwork machine controlled from above. Integrative Culture sees it as a self-generating organism.

We can see now why the neo-cons and fundamentalists are so up in arms. Fundamentalism is not about religion. It’s about the obsession with Control. Between Islamic fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and Christian fundamentalists, what real difference is there? They all have a static, dualistic vision of the world, with “Good” battling “Evil”, they all enshrine primitive writings as the basis of all wisdom, they all want to control and enslave women, they all want rigid authoritarian rules and leaders. They cannot understand the concept of emergence, of Follett’s self-creating coherence. They blind themselves to the discoveries of science, and to centuries of progress in human understanding.

It’s important to realize that this Control Culture/Integrative Culture conflict is not a Left/Right split. For while the Neo-Cons of the Bush administration may epitomize the Control Culture backlash, traditional conservatives, in their preference for spontaneous processes and deep distrust of centralized authority, embrace many Integrative values. Free-market capitalism, with all its flaws and abuses, is still more Integrative than a centralized Marxist state.

Similarly, on the left, there are many Control Culture radicals who insist there is only one "correct" path to social change, which must triumph over all other paths. This path usually puts a priority on gaining centralized political power, at which point change is to be imposed from above by force on a benighted populace. Integrative progressives, on the other hand see change not as imposed from the top but as evolving from spontaneous, grass-roots movements and tend to accept multiple approaches to change. In Integrative movements, for example, those who work with corporations to achieve sustainability are not thought to have "sold out". There is no "blueprint" for change, no "party discipline" and leadership is seen as a quality that ordinary people everywhere can exercise.

THE INTEGRATIVE CHALLENGE

Control Culture depends heavily on boundaries, on walls. The focus on control in the old system led to the creation of rigid mental and physical compartments. The guiding impulse of Integrative Culture is to bring down walls and permeate boundaries--to bring everything--ideas, people, images, cultures, species--into relation with everything else.

Integrative Culture is about synthesizing diversity. Control Culture was about eliminating it.

We've moved from segregation to integration, from Newtonian physics to quantum physics, from authoritarianism to democracy, from a mind/body split to holistic medicine, from World Wars to the European Union, from mechanical models to biological models, from national economies and national corporations to the global economy and global corporations. Boundaries are becoming less rigid everywhere. But this is not a smooth, even process. A wall comes down in Berlin, but walls go up in Israel, and on the U.S.-Mexico border. Old cultural systems are not abandoned without fierce resistance.

The breaking down of walls takes many interesting forms. Consider, for example the modern passion—which began, like so much, in the sixties—for telling old stories from the viewpoint of the Other—Grendel, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, A Thousand Acres, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and so on.

The popularization of anthropological studies that suggested we had much to learn from ‘primitive’ peoples living close to the land—especially hunter-gatherers—began at the same time.

Boundaries between species have also been coming down. The passion for finding ways to communicate with our simian cousins, and for understanding the social systems of other mammals, also began in the sixties. Rigid, defining walls between humans and nonhumans—language, tool making, etc., have fallen one after another. The breakdown of elephant societies through poaching and human encroachment, for example, has been found to produce violent adolescent gangs and PTSD symptoms, just as with humans.

These trends are unsettling to the Controller mentality. The Controller doesn’t like stories told from multiple viewpoints—he wants simple, old-fashioned one-dimensional tales with clear heroes and villains. And he hates the notion of the DNA uniting all of life. He is terrified of the next phase of human cultural evolution.

THE IMPACT ON MEDICINE

During the 1980s a group of midwives in California pooled their resources to found a local birthing center. As they were holding a workshop with new mothers and their babies, a SWAT team with drawn guns and bullet-proof vests burst in and arrested the midwives for practicing medicine without a license. For at that time, giving birth was defined by the medical establishment as a disease--an example of the older culture's fear of losing control.

Modern Western medicine was founded on the study of cadavers, which led doctors to view the body as a passive object to be manipulated by the physician. Disease was an enemy that invaded this helpless body and had to be fought and killed by the knight-like doctor. Health was a matter of dominating and vanquishing enemy germs and cancer cells with biological and chemical weapons, "magic bullets", and knives. But if no enemy germs or cells can be found, this military model tends to leave the physician helpless, especially when faced with auto-immune diseases.

These limitations of Control Culture medicine led to wholesale defections by patients during the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In 1996, for the first time, there were more visits by Americans to alternative practitioners than to traditional Western physicians. Today there is more acceptance by Western doctors of alternative approaches, like acupuncture, that are based on the Integrative concept of helping a self-equilibrating organism balance itself.

The same conflict can be found even in university tenure policy. An article on tenure in academia found sharp contrasts in the attitudes held by older and younger academics about the tenure review process. The older academics wanted the process to be secret, believed competition improved performance, thought research should be organized within disciplines, believed work and family should be kept separate, and thought faculty members should be autonomous. Younger academics thought the review process should be transparent, thought cooperation improved performance, thought research should be organized around problems rather than disciplines, that a balance between work and personal life was important, and that faculty had a collective responsibility. The older academics, in other words, wanted to maintain rigid boundaries between individuals, between disciplines, between work and life, while the younger academics were saying these boundaries were artificial, illusory, and harmful.

But why is all this happening now? Why, after thousands of years of being second-class citizens, did women suddenly reject the role? Why, after thousands of years of accepting tyranny as the natural order of the universe, did people suddenly opt for democracy? Why, after thousands of years of assuming war was just part of life--and the major way that men could prove themselves--did people start seeking peace and creating institutions to preserve it?

There are four main reasons why Integrative Culture is growing today--all arising from the achievements of Control Culture itself:

First, the sharp increase in the pace of technological change;

Second, sudden increases in the speed and breadth of global communication;

Third, increasing awareness of our common dependence on the health of the planet we inhabit together;

Fourth, the decreasing utility of war.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

Warren Bennis and I predicted in 1964 that "democracy was inevitable" and that the Soviet Union and other authoritarian regimes would either collapse or be forced to democratize within fifty years, even if the West did nothing. American conservatives think Ronald Reagan was responsible for the Russian collapse, while the Russians themselves blame rock and roll. But in fact it would have collapsed without either. Since 1980, eighty-three nations have converted to democracy, while thirty-three military dictatorships have been replaced. Authoritarianism can survive in places where nothing much changes for decades at a time, but is too rigid and slow to adapt in an age of rapid change. In the corporate world, hierarchies have flattened, and ad hoc teams are replacing pyramidal bureaucracies. As business analyst William Knoke observes:

The behemoths that performed well in
a static world are proving unadaptable
to a changing marketplace, dizzying
technologies, and dynamic consumer
tastes . . . . Hierarchy and centralized
control are collapsing.

In his book Six Degrees, Duncan Watts points out that during 9/11 centralized emergency systems, like the mayor's emergency command bunker and the police command center, were immediately put out of commission, while informal networks all over the city responded quickly to the crisis.

Repair of a system in such a crisis depends on utilizing all the resources of that system, which in turn requires rapid communication among all of its parts. But hierarchies prevent this by requiring that all communication between departments be routed through managers at the "top".

Toyotas are manufactured by over 200 separate companies, all of which exchange personnel, assistance, and intellectual property--in other words, a network. In 1997 a plant that was the exclusive manufacturer of a crucial brake valve burned to the ground, leaving Toyota with only a two day supply of the valves and no way to make any more until the plant was rebuilt. Car production ground to a halt. Yet within three days 62 of the other companies--none of whom had any previous experience with the valves--became emergency valve producers, with 150 other companies indirectly involved as suppliers. Two weeks after the disaster struck car production was back to normal levels.

This amazing recovery would not have been possible without decentralization--without a rich tradition of full lateral communication at the ground level and cooperative daily problem-solving. It's this flexibility that makes networks so successful in an age of chronic change—where “crises” may happen weekly. And it's this decentralized flexibility that makes groups like Al-Qaeda impossible to destroy by conventional military force.

Someone recently said: in Iraq the higher up you go, the less you know. But this is always true in hierarchies. The one at the top is supposed to have the "big picture", but that picture is made up of a lot of 2nd and 3rd hand information, distorted by the desire to show loyalty to the boss and his ideology. The blunders of Hitler, Mao, Johnson, Nixon, and Bush exemplify this.

COMMUNICATION

As an executive training exercise, management expert Charles Handy would select two men from opposite sides of a room, place them in chairs facing away from each other, and auction off, one at a time, three five-pound notes, giving each man a turn at bidding first. Invariably the notes were sold at or above their actual value:

The rest of the group watched, amazed
by the apparent idiocy of the bidding.
There would be a rush of volunteers for
the next round . . . [but] The
result would be the same as long as I
was careful to pick them from different
sides of the room.

Finally he'd choose a pair he'd seen whispering together. One would bid pennies, the other would pass, then they'd split the proceeds.

Communication changed the game. And communication is what creates Integrative Culture. The doom of Control Culture was foreshadowed when international trade was born. In Control Culture value came from scarcity. In Integrative Culture it comes from profusion. A single telephone, modem, or fax machine is worth nothing. The more there are the more value they have.

ECOLOGY

Control Culture split the world into a battleground of warring opposites. Everything had to be cut in two--even the unity of the human body was denied: The right hand became the "righteous" hand and the left hand was "sinister," as if the two halves of the body were enemies.

Today it's harder to make these splits. The world is shrinking. It's harder to avoid each other, harder to ignore each other, harder to deceive each other. Harder to deny our interdependence. You can't take action anywhere in the world without it having repercussions for everyone. Modern industry, modern chemicals, and modern weapons are all indifferent to national boundaries. We live in a woven world.

It's also a finite world. Our economic system demands perpetual growth, but unlimited growth is, after all, cancer. The only thing that can be expanded indefinitely is communication--relationships, linkages. And that's what Integrative Culture is all about.

WAR

War as we know it, with standing armies, pitched battles, and large scale slaughter, has only been around for a few thousand years, and for most of that time it had a practical value based on an agrarian economic system. Through war you could acquire land and the slaves to work it. Today war doesn't buy you anything, even security. There's nothing you can get with war today that you can't get more cheaply without it. Going to war today therefore requires some sort of moral pretext--an enemy must somehow be demonized, dehumanized.

Furthermore, modern warfare lacks the glamour of ancient hand-to-hand combat, being largely a matter of destroying infrastructures and slaughtering civilians. The romance of war received a mortal wound when the gun replaced the sword, and was put out of its misery by Hiroshima.

Finally, the global economy has created a world where it's hard to find a place to shoot where you won't hit yourself--your own companies, citizens, and assets. The head of McDonald’s in Serbia, worried about having his stores trashed by Serbian patriots during the NATO attacks on his country in the 1990s, put a Serbian hat on the McDonald’s logo, passed out free burgers during anti-NATO and anti-U.S. rallies, and in every way supported Serbia against the United States. The reaction of his American bosses? A large bonus for keeping the stores open. Unless you're selling weaponry, war is no longer good for business. The world's five most prosperous nations, in terms of average personal income, don't engage in it.

It may seem odd to say war is obsolete when American soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. But to say something is obsolete doesn't mean it ceases to exist. Monarchy is obsolete, but there are still kings and queens. People still ride horses, too, and take buggy-rides. What does it mean, then, to say war is obsolete?

Terrorism can't be eliminated by military means. All the planes, tanks, and missiles in the world won't stop a single terrorist from poisoning a water supply or hijacking a plane. A network is not a nation, and as John Arquilla, professor of analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, points out, it takes a network to fight a network. Clinging to an archaic boundary concept just gets in the way when you're trying to cope with a network that has no boundaries. The Bush administration approach to terrorism is like buying a machine gun to rid your back yard of mosquitos.

Over the last 200 years Control Culture, and the assumptions that feed it, have been in decline. Governments have become more democratic, hierarchies have flattened, women have gained power and status, and war has become unpopular in most of the civilized world. And since hand-to-hand combat has little relation to modern life--even to modern war--the traits men are trained in from birth have become irrelevant to the world we live in. The cooperative skills women have been forced to specialize in, on the other hand, have become increasingly important in our shrinking world. The status of women has increased proportionately. In universities and professional schools women students, once a small minority, are becoming dominant.

IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS

Today, every aspect of Control Culture is being challenged--and every aspect is being bitterly defended.

If change happened slowly and smoothly we might be able to handle it more gracefully. But that's not what happens. As they sense an old cultural system dying around them, those who espouse it will assert its values more harshly, more stridently, more desperately. The most extreme forms of authoritarianism, for example, occurred in the 1930s, when democracy was a growing trend.

The growth of Integrative Culture and the simultaneous rise of fundamentalism around the world make us feel the world's going in opposite directions at the same time. We've never been more concerned about the environment yet never more destructive of it; never more distrustful of technology yet never more dependent on it; never more opposed to violence yet never more fascinated with it; never more ego-driven and never more hungry to lose ourselves in something beyond ego; never more health conscious yet never more unhealthy. And while we've never had more ways of connecting with each other, we've never felt more disconnected.

These are the predictable symptoms of a culture in transition. Old familiar habits have begun to seem irrelevant or destructive, while the emerging system still feels awkward and uncomfortable, like shoes that haven't yet shaped themselves to our feet.

It would be nice if some sort of compromise were possible. After all, isn't every healthy culture full of contradictions? Lewis Mumford once observed that cultures survive only when they're logically impure--when they accumulate inconsistencies like lichen on a rock.

Medieval Europe had a Feast of Fools, for example, during which nobles and peasants exchanged roles, priests were the butt of practical jokes, and all the usual taboos and rules of deference to one's "superiors" were abolished for a day. The Japanese have a tradition that anything said while drunk will have no repercussions in daily lives. Ceremonious Brits adore making fun of pomposity, and materialistic Americans are addicted to sentimental movies proclaiming that the best things in life are free. Such contradictions, Mumford said, protect a cultural system from "self-asphyxiation".

PURITY DESTROYS

But when an old cultural system begins to decay it's these very stabilizing inconsistencies that come under attack. Fundamentalists and other ideologues believe they're trying to "revive" or "revitalize" a system when they call for a return to "basic values" or "fundamental principles", but since it's the contradictions that protect a system from self-asphyxiation, these purists are in effect smothering it. When Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution to strip away "impurities" from Chinese communism he smothered the system and opened the door to capitalistic and democratic reforms.

The purest forms of a social system appear when it's decaying. The rigidly dualistic Nazis tried to control every aspect of life, believed war was the fullest expression of German manhood, reduced women to near-slave status, and maintained an oppressive authoritarian hierarchy. The Third Reich was Control Culture's purest example, and it lasted a mere 12 years. Its demise heralded the collapse of authoritarianism's global hegemony.

"Impurity" implies a degree of consensus about what ought to be--a generally accepted framework within which these "impurities" can be permitted. The Feast of Fools was allowable only when people generally accepted the status quo it mocked. It came into disfavor during the 17th and 18th centuries as the social distance between classes was being questioned. It was all right to play games with the rigid class system as long as that system was unchallenged, but when it was under attack its values had to be asserted more stridently. It was no longer a joking matter. Yet in its prime the Feast of Fools, far from being a challenge to hierarchy, was a measure of how utterly secure people felt about it.

Today there is no center yet from which "impurities" can diverge. It will be decades before Integrative Culture achieves the kind of general acceptance that Control Culture enjoyed for thousands of years.

The "purity" of fundamentalist ideologies is symptomatic of a terminal cultural illness. But Integrative enthusiasts need to recognize and honor in themselves the same need for stability and familiarity that activates their foes. Radical leftists in the past have often crippled themselves through an egoistic devotion to ideological purity, preferring to go down with the ship singing "nearer to the left than thee" rather than share a lifeboat with conservatives and compromising liberals.

A new cultural system tends to be built around what was trivialized in the old one. Integrative values were never absent during the Controller era, they were simply assigned inferior status--something women concerned themselves with. Similarly, when Integrative Culture achieves a comfortable preponderance in our shrinking world, Controller values will have a niche—something men play with. The kind of consensus that will permit this is a long way off, but we can take some comfort from the likelihood that our descendants will enjoy it. Prophets of doom always attract an audience because people love drama, but the probable reality is more mundane: we can expect a long period of adaptation, during which violent flare-ups, like those of this decade, will gradually diminish in frequency as more and more of the world embraces the emerging culture. Life on our planet will then settle into an equilibrium--one that may not create any more happiness, but will at least be more stable. ::

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